26 May 2018 10:00 AM

I trust we’re all up to speed on the “lump of labour” fallacy, the notion that there is only so much work to go around and that it ought to be shared fairly.

French governments a few years ago were enamoured of this view, passing laws mandating a limited working week and enforcing it by, for example, having inspectors check whose vehicles had been in the staff car park for how long.

I am not making this up.

Not that Britain was immune. Back in the Seventies and early Eighties, the cry went up from the unions: “Overtime is stolen time!”

Stolen from whom, exactly?

Anyway, we’ve all moved on, as they say, and come to understand that everyone should be set free to work as much or as little as they wish. Fair enough. But the demise of the lump of labour fallacy has left what may be called two sub-issues on the landscape, one a fallacy, one not.

The fallacy can be heard any time someone – usually a farmer, hotelier, restaurateur or similar – bemoans the fact that Brexit means a shortage of available staff. The departed east Europeans and others cannot simply be replaced by British workers because they refuse to do the work.

This is the “lump of wages” fallacy, the notion that employers have only a limited amount of money for the payroll and the simple expedient of raising pay to attract domestic workers is thus out of the question. It is extraordinary how many people swallow this nonsense.

The second is what may be described as a sub-set of the lump of labour fallacy that is proving remarkably prescient. Labour overall may not be limited, but what about labour suitable for university graduates?

When the huge expansion of higher education was put in hand by the Blair governments, the justification was that graduates earned more than non-graduates, thus this was an investment in economic growth. The more graduates there were, of course, the flimsier became this rationale, because the end-point – a 100 per cent graduate labour force – would mean no graduate premium whatsoever.

Presumably, Blair and Co thought the supply of graduate-level jobs would expand to accommodate the supply of gradates. No lump of labour fallacy here. No sir.

Now we find perhaps 40 per cent of graduates are in non-graduate jobs. So, how’s that working out for you?

In 1991, I and fellow journalists were taking coffee in an hotel in Kuala Lumpur with an adviser to the then Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir (I wonder what happened to him?). On the subject of the expansion of higher education, he explained that Malaysia was treading carefully to ensure there would be suitable posts for the newly-minted graduates.

There were, he declared, fewer more potent sources of social instability than a large pool of graduate unemployment. Or, he could have added, under-employment.

Inspired by this I wrote, many years later when at The Mail on Sunday, words to the effect that we could be breeding a future generation of disgruntled social would-be insurgents, enraged that they had borrowed lots of student-loan money in the expectation of a professional job, a converted farmhouse and a wife called Joanna, and had been cheated.

They would, of course, pretend to be fiercely opposed to such a bourgeois lifestyle. The reality is that this is what they wanted and will never get.

No wonder they’re jolly cross.

Miscellany on Saturday

THE flip side of graduates in non-graduate jobs is that having a degree is increasingly required for any sort of gainful employment. It is the equivalent of the days when academics and some schoolmasters had to be in Holy Orders.

- Ireland votes big for the legalisation (aren't we supposed to say "partial decriminalisation" these days?) of abortion. Next up, no doubt, euthanasia (sorry, "assisted dying"). An old orthodoxy is dismantled, a new one constructed.

- Meanwhile, I am quite enjoying A Very British Scandal, (BBC 1), despite being in the odd position (since my teens) of simultaneously feeling desperately sorry for Norman Scott and thinking Jeremy Thorpe was a very under-rated political thinker.

- So Meghan Markle is going to “fight for feminism”, we are told. Hands up all those who think that is going to end well.

(Pause)

I said hands up all those who…ah, right, OK.

Presumably those of us who live in Sussex will be treated to regular doses of the cracker-barrel PC philosophy of our new Duchess.

- Another week in the decline of the once-mighty Telegraph titles, with the daily paper producing a huge virtue-signalling “investigation” into “sexism in rugby”. It's like seeing a very dear old friend making a complete fool of himself.

- Finally, roman-a-clef is defined as a novel in which real people are disguised behind made-up names. I have just been re-reading The Company, by John Ehrlichman, former White House aide (Simon & Schuster, 1976). Here is a roman-a-clef with very little clef. In a cracking yarn, we are treated to incumbent president Esker Anderson (Lyndon Johnson), his successor Richard Monckton (Richard Nixon), Monckton’s sinister chief of staff Frank Flaherty (HR Haldeman), and his national security adviser Carl Tessler (Henry Kissinger).

I suspect the author may deliberately have made identification easy in order that the reader may feel erudite and well-informed. In other words: Midsomer Murders, DC.

It was turned into the television series Washington Behind Closed Doors (Paramount Television, 1977). Interestingly, the central character, CIA chief Bill Martin (Richard Helms in real life), leaves his wife for another woman in both the book and the series. But he returns to her on the small screen while sticking with the Other Woman on the page.

That sort of malarkey was, presumably, all right in print but not on the box.

19 May 2018 8:27 AM

THIS has been a very hectic week with no time for thinking great thoughts, or even rubbishy ones. So instead of writing something myself, I'll suggest a couple of pieces by other people that may entertain and inform.

From City AM a few days ago there is this article on how the euro-zone's Target2 payment system is being (ab)used as a giant credit card by indebted countries helping themselves to German money that will never be repaid.

In the Daily Mail there was this excellent piece by Quentin Letts on the bogus and sinister "safeguarding" industry.

Finally, if time hangs heavy you may be kind enough to read my review/revisit of The Red House, by Derek Lambert, on the Lion & Unicorn site.

Have a good weekend.

dan.atkinson@live.co.uk

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press

12 May 2018 10:00 AM

I had heard about the “lift ladies” in Japanese department stores, but didn’t really believe they existed until my first (and so far only) trip to Tokyo, at the end of the Eighties. Their “job” comprised standing outside the lift doors and, when the doors opened, smiling and bowing to those leaving the lift car.

They didn’t operate the lifts. They didn’t even press the “lift call” button for those wishing to use the elevator service.

Just bowed. And smiled.

To be fair, they were remarkably attractive and seemed very pleasant. But then, if you were a curmudgeon, it was probably not the job for you.

I wonder if they are still about? If not, presumably today’s Japanese marvel at the thought that people were actually paid to perform this essentially pointless task.

In those days, of course, Japan was routinely praised for having (by the standards of Europe and America in the Eighties) very low levels of unemployment. Currently, it is another rain-soaked, tea-drinking, Royal family-loving island nation that is held up as an example of labour-market success. Our own.

The trouble is, British lift ladies are everywhere. Examples include:

My local supermarket has supplemented its existing (quite smart) security guards with a second group of (quite slovenly) operatives. How much “security” does a shop need?

London Bridge Station would seem to have acquired a new type of petty official distinguishable from the existing version by a different uniform.

Despite automated book-in for appointments at a local surgery (you enter name and date of birth and the machine does the rest) there appears no reduction in the number of receptionists, who seems to spend a lot of time carrying bits of paper round the premises.

Similarly, staff in my local bank – in which practically everything has been either automated or located in a far-away call centre accessible through telephone booths located in the branch – now patrol the floor asking customers if they need any help. Given the cash machine has been about for more than 50 years, the answer is usually no.

All this without even mentioning the vast shoals of pointless (or worse) jobs in local and central government and quango-land.

Nobody asks too many questions about the sustainability of our “jobs miracle”, and maybe that’s understandable. Unemployment was a 15-year curse from the late Seventies to the early-Nineties. Who wants to go back there?

But then, when I was in Japan, it seemed the economic and labour-market boom would last forever. How-to management books instructed western businesses in the Japanese way of doing things. Hollywood was falling to the mighty Yen, and retaliated with ludicrous yellow-peril movies such as Rising Sun (1993).

Within a few short years, Japan was entering the first of what is currently just over two “lost decades”, and counting.

Lift ladies beware.

Bits and pieces on Saturday

CHRIS Grayling, the Transport Secretary, promises a “digital revolution” on the nation’s railways. In place of old-fashioned trackside signals, apparently, will be guidance equipment installed in the driver’s cab. Given the public transport payroll (or “dole queue” as we used to call it) is perhaps the most egregious example of “lift ladies” anywhere in the economy, I don’t expect all this high-techery to make much difference to either staffing levels or ticket prices.

Meanwhile, it is good to see Labour – battered by accusations of failing to deal with intimidatory behaviour, particularly anti-semitism – sacking a shadow cabinet member over bullying allegations. OK, the sackee was someone called Debbie Abrahams, but you can’t have everything.

I was never a big fan of "gonzo journalist" Hunter S. Thompson, but enjoyed this review in the New Statesman. Asked for a definition of a “gonzo journalist”, someone – possibly me – replied: “A drug addict with a press card.”

The mention above of how-to guides to the winning ways of Japanese management reminded me of the crop of books that succeeded them in the mid and late Nineties, when the shine had gone off the country’s economic performance. They involved digging up historical figures – Attila the Hun, Alexander the Great – and drawing (usually spurious) pointers for managerial strategy from their bloodthirsty activities. It could only be a matter of time, I thought, before we were treated to Heinrich Himmler CEO: Lessons for business success from the career of a genocidal maniac. Fortunately, the trend ran out of steam.

I revisit a novel by Peter Van Greenaway on the Lion & Unicorn site here, mentioning, in passing, that my parents came across him when they, and he, lived on the river at Chelsea a lifetime ago. It has been said that Hampstead was the refuge for people fleeing Hitler and Chelsea the bolt-hole for those fleeing boring old mummy and daddy. Given my parents worked for the Hampstead library service, I'd say they had both London's liberal bases covered.

A staunch defence of real liberalism from Brendan O'Neil here, demanding everyone's right, in George Orwell's terms, to say that two and two equals four, or, in his example: "It is my sincerely held belief that a man can never become a woman. That no matter how many hormones he takes, or operations he has, or fabulous outfits he buys, a person who was born male can never become female." Mine too, old lad. But not a view shared by our Prime Minister, that "daughter of the vicarage". Why does anyone imagine there is anything daring or radical about "transgender-ism"?

Sir Alex Ferguson’s first words on coming round after brain surgery were, apparently an enquiry as to the performance of Doncaster Rovers (son Darren is on the team). I am reminded of the British soccer coach working in America’s deep south back in the Nineties, who, after a nasty car accident, was rushed to hospital, sans identification and practically in a coma. A nurse was stationed at his bedside with instructions to listen out for anything he said that could identify him. After a while, he regained consciousness, spoke two short sentences, and the nurse was able to report that he was (a) English and (b) very worried about his holiday home. His precise words? “The Villa. I’ve got to know about the Villa.”

05 May 2018 10:00 AM

HARDLY had the Halifax collapsed into the rescuing arms of the British State in October 2008 after its parent company – Halifax Bank of Scotland – had fallen victim to the financial crisis – than I was queuing at a branch in west London. The line, as our American friends would say, seemed to be moving remarkably slowly.

Or perhaps not so remarkably. Most of the windows were closed. Behind one of those that was actually open, no fewer than three clerks were attending to a single customer. My first thought was that the Halifax had adapted remarkably quickly to the working practices of a nationalised industry. Then I recalled that the last time I saw anything similar had been some years earlier, at a branch of Barclays.

In Nairobi.

Perhaps it was then that the notion took hold that Britain was turning into a Third World economy, the argument of the fourth book Larry Elliott and I wrote together, Going South (Palgrave Macmillan; 2012). I haven’t changed my mind since. Inefficiency, sloth, nothing working – all are symptoms of a de-developing society, in my view.

But the mob-handed “service” devoted to just one customer while the rest can whistle is also, I believe, a symptom of something else, a business on the skids.

Many years ago, I heard Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, with its wry take on American corporate life, interviewed on the radio. All I can remember now is his check list of how to tell a company that is doomed, and of that list I can remember just one item. It referred to a business that arranged what we didn’t then call an off-site at a hotel or conference centre during which executives would play golf in between discussing their “contribution to the value stream”.

I have some other warning signs. Let’s start with a variation of my bad Halifax experience, the service industry – bar, restaurant, hotel – where a sizeable chunk of the available personnel is engaged in tasks other than serving the public. You’re at a bar, one barman/barmaid is pouring drinks and another is filling in bits of paper on a clipboard or engaged in earnest discussion on the internal phone.

Doomed.

Then there’s the appearance of a new and entirely un-necessary tier of management. A business that loses sight of the absolute need to keep to a minimum the number of staff members who do not themselves generate any income is doomed.

Costly exercises in which consultants are hired to find out how the employees “feel” about the business are a very bad sign, as are endless staff “appraisals”. In fact, all activity that puts the internal affairs of the business ahead of the cultivation and servicing of clients and customers points to commercial doom.

Companies with extensive “policies” on just about anything may not be long for this world. That’s true of internal policies but it is doubly so with regard to customers, who are simply uninterested in anything other than receiving the product or service in question.

In the services sector, another red flag is an obsession with contracts and time sheets. Maybe I am showing my own prejudices here, but I conduct business on the basis that relationships are the key and nothing else matters much.

All of this can be summed up in the principle that anything that gets between the business and its customers is bad news and will ultimately bring the firm down. About the same time as I heard the Scott Adams interview, I watched a factual television programme in which a management guru explained to his audience of (I think) business students that he was about to introduce them to the most unreasonable, the most demanding, the most unsympathetic so-and-so they were ever going to meet.

The customer.

Miscellany on Saturday

I wish I could remember the name of said guru, as I’d like to give him due credit. Typing the above line about un-necessary tiers of management reminded me of my newspaper days, when you could always tell when someone had gone for a promotion and failed to get it because a new little piece of process would be created to keep them happy.

A hypothetical example. Fred or Barbara, you would be told, had been put in charge of a “movements desk” (or similar) and hacks going on assignment out of London or abroad would be required to log their details with the new movements supremo/suprema. If you asked why you would be told that it was to prevent duplicated effort and expense, to ensure that the same story wasn’t being chased by news, features, sport, foreign desk and so on.

Had this ever happened?

Not exactly, but the new arrangements would make sure it did not.

Meanwhile, was there ever such nonsense talked than about the “mis-casting” of a BBC concert performance of West Side Story? Sierra Boggess, who was to have sung the part of Maria, has pulled out and said a “Latina” performer ought to take her place. Critics had said it was wrong for a white woman to be cast as Maria.

OK, so what is a Latina, exactly? Do Italian women count? If not, why not, and if so, don’t they tend to be, er, white? Presumably the BBC will be extra vigilant in future, to ensure parts are allocated only to people from the correct Bantu homeland.

Forgive my failure to be impressed by the Government’s “crackdown” on supposedly-dodgy companies based in British territories in the West Indies and elsewhere. So, the true beneficial owners will have to declare themselves? No, they won’t. What could be easier than to install “front” shareholders who have signed a contract to transfer all their stock, for free, whenever the real owner should need it?

The point being, of course, that the contract (which need never be made public) ensures that the real owner never will need it.

Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph on Thursday reported that the Football Association is urging the makers of Subbuteo to make generally available a limited edition ladies team, on the ground that this would help the FA to "tackle barriers" within the women's game, which is gaining in popularity. On most recent figures, earlier this year, attendances at women's games were said to be down more than ten per cent. So, gaining, er, downwards, then?

Finally, a headline in The Times on Wednesday: “Why I welcome return of the Nanny State.” Pardon me, but for something to return, doesn’t it have to go away in the first place?